Big doings Friday at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett where Melissa & The Moguls, a new rock band headed by Melissa Levis, pokes fun at The Hamptons' mystique while raising charity bucks.

Re the late Yankee broadcaster Mel Allen, Pete Gallo reminds us of Mel's pitchman expertise for such sponsors as Ballantine beer and his "Light up a White Owl and smile smile smile." Ol' Mel could work a sponsor plug into a routine foul ball.

Best-selling author Allan Cox, the marketing guru, is out on tour plugging his latest, "Redefining Corporate Soul," published by Irwin Professional Publishing in Burr Ridge, Ill., and written with former Ad Ager Julie Liesse. Cox's best known book is "Straight Talk for Monday Morning."

Scott Mowbray, publisher & edit director for Eating Well magazine, sends along the first issue of a new women's service mag, Fresh Ideas, that they're doing with Safeway, the big supermarket chain. Not a custom-published giveaway, it's on sale only through their checkouts with all but 8 of its pages independently produced. Scott says Safeway sells more mags than any other U.S. supermarket chain.

Classy looking batch of ads in that new House Beautiful million-dollar centennial ad campaign launched July 8 by Publisher Jeffrey Burch. Chris Meigher's new magazine Saveur goes from six to eight times a year, effective January/February.

But did he get an A in history? Congrats to Edward Z. Hughes, newly promoted publisher of American Heritage.

And ending up, the most pointed wake-up call to Bill & Hillary I've read: "Here are the Clintons at what most people would call a destination point, and all they can do is keep searching. They are so unfinished, so intellectually unstable, so uncomfortable in their own skins, so desperate to win the love of everybody, that they think they must be everybody. They constantly, unnervingly, take on different identities and gurus. Bill Clinton has to be the only President who is still social climbing. Mrs. Clinton tries on an array of motivational mountebanks, from Tony Robbins to Marianne Williamson to Stephen Covey to Dr. Houston-the spiritual equivalent of her hairstyles. Where is the brainy, no-nonsense Methodist lawyer who was going to keep the shambling, loosey-goosey Bill on the straight and narrow? Neither one seems to have a center now..."

This, on the op-ed page of The New York Times, was written not by some rightwing Pat Robertson Bible-thumper but by Maureen Dowd.